Poetry

Manic

I did not know, any longer, the meaning of my happiness; it held me unexplained. Eudora Welty Out I would go, as if out were a city, and I was buoyant and self-absorbed, my own climate, though like a pond my city held its own warm and chill districts aloof to the good news and…

Eurydice

It bears no correlation to the living world. It is as if a malice toward all things malleable, mutable, had seized the universe and emptied its spherical alleys. How could you think it, that I would choose to stay, or break under the journey back? Like a dog I had followed your unravelling skein of…

Depressive

No wonder it feels like a chore, by the hour, the ounce, the follicle, and no wonder we’d be more bored without our boring jobs than we are on the grayest Monday. It’s work, being depressed, and we’re tired, and we fall asleep and dream and wake like a skim of fat on a broth,…

A Marriage Poem

1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs — inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is…

Mykonos. Wall With Mailbox

The tacky dromedaries of the tachydromeion, Swaying in place, are yellow and are blue. They browse upon my postcards. The Aegean Gallops in all directions all around them. They are true Stoics. They can go nowhere. And they do. The light grows positively Sophoclean. Towerings and dishevelments ensue. A slash of zacharoplasteion neon Scribbles a…

Bystanders

When it snowed hard, cars failed at the hairpin turn above the house. They’d slur off line and drift to a ditch — or creep back down, the driver squinting out from a half- open door, his hindsight glazed by snow on the rear window and cold breath on the mirrors. Soon he’d be at…

Marriage

When you enter this country, it will seem familiar. There will be trees — elms? maples? — with the dense foliage of August afternoons in the old part of town. But in that field you can see in the distance, green stalks have just surfaced above the mud and water — is it rice? bamboo?…

Kimono

The woman on the other side      of the evergreens a small boy is hidden in,      I’m wearing valleys, clear skies,      thawing banks narcissus and hollow reeds      break through. It means the world to him, this flat      archaic fabric no weather worries.      Each time I bend, brushing my hair, a bird      has just dipped through its…